For conspiracy theorists, looking for UFOs in official NASA photographs has become a sort of rite of passage. While there are more than a few of these suspected photos and videos featuring alleged crafts from another world, I want to focus on just one today. Earlier this month, some UFO enthusiasts spotted what appeared to be an unexplained “formation” in a NASA image.

Here’s the photograph in question zoomed in on the formation. No, that’s not a smudge on your screen. Those may very well be UFOs.

Not long after it was posted online, the image was mysteriously removed. Following the typical conspiracy theory uproar when something like this occurs, the photo was later found in a different spot on NASA’s website.

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However, elsewhere on that very same long-exposure photograph are several other “objects.”

For the skeptic, it might be tempting to write them off as simply pieces of space debris, but that would be ignoring an obvious point.

During these long-exposure shots, normal pieces of space debris (if they showed up at all) would appear as streaks of color on the photo because they are orbiting the Earth. These objects though, show no signs of that.

This is normally where I would rationalize and try to explain the objects we’re seeing in the photographs. However, that last point about moving objects versus non-moving objects during a long-exposure photo makes me question what it is we’re actually seeing…